Faces in the Fire (26 page)

He began peeling off his right glove, rolling it back over his hand, as he walked into the room and approached her. She stared, her pupils dilating into large buttons, but she made no move to stop him.

He was over her now, and he reached for her with his hand—his bare right hand—lightly touching the skin of her forehead with a gentle stroke, as if giving her a loving benediction.

But that's not what it was. He felt the brief iciness of the skin-on-skin contact, and even before he drew his hand away, her eyes rolled back into her head as her body went into violent convulsions.

A massive heart attack. A stroke. Sometimes both; he'd seen autopsies of past victims, the doctors' notes wondering how people with otherwise healthy vascular systems could have such sudden and violent ends as veins in their body literally exploded under pressure.

He didn't have to wonder why. He knew too well.

He turned away from the woman, thankful her convulsions were at least quiet. It wasn't always that way. Sometimes people uttered small moans or guttural grunts. Sometimes the joints of their bodies cracked and snapped under the tension. One man had even managed to grab his arm before he could pull away, digging yellow fingernails into the flesh of his forearm. He'd carried bruises and scratches for weeks.

The kid was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, his jaw slack as he stared at the convulsing woman on the bed. Stan pulled on his surgical glove once more, slowly and carefully, before pushing the kid out of the way and walking out the door.

He took the stairs again, not hurrying as he descended to the ground floor. Now was the time when the images always flooded his mind. Not this woman; this one was better than most, because he had turned his back before most of the convulsions took her. And he hadn't spoken to her. He'd made that mistake before.

Some of those people still haunted his mind. The ones who tried to talk themselves out of the situation. The ones who cried when they saw him. The ones who begged him to take pity.

But most of all, his grandfather and Sherman. Them, every time. Them, every day.

He pushed the ghosts from his mind as they fought to be seen and heard, focusing instead on the one image that could always drown them out. The catfish.

The catfish ruled them all, its brown tail sweeping away the murky images of past memories as it swam across the surface of his mind.

He was at street level now, and he pushed his way back onto the street outside, eager to get out of the building. Outside, the air felt even more stale, but the catfish could help that too. He concentrated on the image of the fish swimming, staring into its black eyes.

At the car, he slid into the passenger seat, closing his eyes and modulating his breathing. Blocking all outside stimuli. It was over now, and he wouldn't be doing it again for . . . well, who knew how long? But certainly not in the next week. The Organization didn't want such things to be spaced too closely together, didn't want seemingly unrelated deaths to be connected by association.

Slowly the catfish began to swim away from his consciousness. When he was desperate, when he was drowning and reaching for the image, the catfish was giant, filling his entire mind with its dark eyes and round mouth. But as he calmed, the catfish always swam away from his vision, getting smaller and smaller, moving away through the brown water until it was lost in the murkiness.

He heard a car door open, then close, beside him. That would be the kid, returning. Still he kept his eyes closed, waiting for the catfish to disappear completely before he would open them again.

The kid spoke. “She was . . .” He let the sentence trail off, unsure how to finish it.

The catfish receded into nothingness. Stan opened his eyes, turned his head, stared at the kid, who was looking down at his hands on the steering wheel. Same as it always was; the kid, like so many others before him, was looking deep inside himself, wondering why he'd ever wanted to see such a thing.

Stan, himself, never wanted to see such things. But he didn't have a choice, did he?

He wanted to pat the kid on the shoulder, tell him everything was fine. But he didn't want to experience that inevitable flinch, watch the kid pull away like he was some kind of monster.

Of course, he
was
a monster. The kid wouldn't have found that out if he'd only stayed in the car.

“Yeah, kid,” he finally said. “She was.”

5.

That night, after catching a flight, he checked into an airport hotel in Cincinnati. The Organization had a rather sophisticated travel system built for him. Flights were always booked on planes flying at less than 50 percent capacity; the Organization kept track of flight loads and seating assignments, somehow forging tickets that always got him onto the flights. He was literally untraceable, because he never officially showed up on the manifest list for any flight. Amazing, really, that airports and the airlines didn't have more stringent security.

Wherever he stayed between assignments, he always received packages by overnight courier, consisting of flight tickets, identification, and forged credit cards for his new identity. His hotels, meals, and other travel expenses went on the never-ending array of cards. He guessed some accounting wonk in the Organization kept track of his spending, but no one ever asked questions. The
Organization also included $1,000 in each package. Another mystery for him; with most of his costs covered by the credit cards, he rarely went through more than a hundred bucks between jobs. Viktor never demanded it back, never asked how he spent it, so: let sleeping dogs lie.

After an assignment, his next ticket always took him to a major hub; most of his time on assignment was spent at Days Inns in Detroit, Hampton Inns in Atlanta, Radissons in Salt Lake City. The Organization knew how to plan these things a month or more in advance, keeping him on flights with major airlines, always under new aliases. After each assignment, he destroyed the documents he'd been given, replacing them with new ones.

He'd never traveled under the same name twice in the two years he'd been doing this. The Organization lived up to its name in that regard: it was organized, always keeping him shuttling from one location to the next. Once a month or so it was a new city and new assignment, followed by a few weeks in transfer cities, then on to the next assignment.

After checking in to the hotel, he put his small case on the fake wood-grained desk that seemed to be in every midrange hotel room, then swept the bedspread and blanket off the mattress and shoved them into the corner.

He never trusted the bedding; you never knew how often the blankets and bedspreads were washed, if ever. Sheets, yes. Those had to be laundered. So he slept only in sheets, even when he was in cities like Denver in the dead of winter. It helped that he never got cold, because his body seemed to run hotter than normal. Had been that way ever since puberty. Ever since Sherman. Ever since his grandfather.

He knew, deep down inside, he would never be cold in this life or the next one, as if his metabolism were preparing him for the eternity he would surely spend in hell.

Stan lay down on the sheets of the bed, spreading out. He considered turning on the television but decided against it. What would he see on the TV but car accidents and robberies on the local news, criminals tracked on crime programs billed as entertainment, lives of misery caught forever by the lenses of ever-present cameras? Just a year into the new millennium—the twenty-first century so many had feared would be the end of the world—and things were still spinning down.

No, the world hadn't ended with Y2K, as so many people had feared. But he'd known all along that wouldn't happen. What he knew about this life, this existence, told him the end wouldn't come in a sudden blast. It would come in slow, shuddering gasps, extracting the most pain possible.

And every time he watched the television, his theories were confirmed. Y2K wasn't the end. But it certainly was the beginning of the end.

He hoped.

He closed his eyes, thinking of sleep but knowing it wouldn't come. Not yet. After a few moments he stood again, went to his travel bag on the desk, pulled out a plastic bag containing a large white prescription bottle. This was the one thing the Organization had given him that had been salvation. He twisted off the top, shook two of the giant lozenges into his hand, paused a moment before shaking out a third and popping them all into his mouth. He fought the urge to keep going, to keep popping every pill in the bottle until it was empty and he was full. He would welcome the oblivion.

But then, the Organization knew where his mother was. They kept a close eye on her in a long-term care facility. They always reminded him they were paying for her care as part of his employment, as if this were a benefit like a retirement plan or paid medical. But Stan knew why they were so careful to give him frequent updates on his mother and her progress. If he were to stop his assignments, if he were to disappear unexpectedly, if he were to overdose on these miraculous “sleeping” pills, his mother's health would take a sudden downturn.

Stan went to the bathroom, looked at the ghost staring back at him in the mirror, drank a glass of water. After that, he returned to the bed and lay on top of the sheets. He closed his eyes once more, feeling the pleasant heaviness overtaking his body, and breathed deeply.

In moments, he was asleep.

1.

Stan killed his first victim when he was only twelve years old, and he did it by barely lifting a finger.

Ha-ha. A little black humor in that. Lifting a finger.

Because that's what the Killing Curse was all about.

Mr. Sherman only had himself to blame, really. His first and only year as a PE teacher at P.S. 238, and yet it was clear to every boy in his gym class that Mr. Sherman had never really grown past sixth grade himself. Balding, slumping, glowering—nothing that spoke of the joy of physical activity —Mr. Sherman carried the weight of his past around on his shoulders. Stan would later find out Mr. Sherman had been a star basketball player in high school, even had a shot at a small college upstate. But Mr. Sherman had flunked out in a year, moved back to the city, and quietly earned a teaching degree at a city college.

Stan found all this out, of course, long after he'd killed Mr. Sherman. He'd found out many things about Mr. Sherman after killing him. More than he'd ever found out about the man while he was alive.

“Hawkins!” Mr. Sherman barked out in his husky voice on that morning, picking him from the lineup of eighteen boys in gym class. Mr. Sherman was a big believer in last names only. You were never Craig or Mark or Stan; you were only Krasinski or Franklin or Hawkins.

Stan stepped forward from the line, and Mr. Sherman shouted another name.

“Kramden!”

Mr. Sherman's voice was deep, guttural, as if finished with deep-grit sandpaper. Stan had been feeling that kind of grit in his own throat lately; when he spoke, he didn't recognize his own voice.

Kramden stepped forward, and Mr. Sherman tilted his head back, staring down the line at the two boys as if trying to study them from a better angle. This was one of those odd things Mr. Sherman always did, something the boys imitated in the locker room after class.

“Pick your teams,” Mr. Sherman finally said. “You got first, Kramden.” He tilted his head forward again, lifted his clipboard to look at it.

“Um, Mr. Sherman?”

It was Kramden, speaking up to ask a question. Odd enough. Talking wasn't something encouraged in Mr. Sherman's gym class. Especially talking
to
Mr. Sherman.

Mr. Sherman let his gaze slide from the clipboard back to Kramden.

“Um,” Kramden stammered, as if now deciding he really shouldn't ask.

“Just spit it out, Kramden.”

“I was just, um, wondering . . . what we're playing.”

Mr. Sherman squinted, walked across the gym floor toward Kramden, his sneakers squeaking on the successive coats of lacquer.

The cavernous gym was quiet for a few moments as Mr. Sherman eyed the squirming form of Kramden.

“That what this is, Kramden? Playing? A game?”

Kramden tried not to look at Mr. Sherman. “I . . . I . . .”

“Hawkins,” Mr. Sherman said, still holding Kramden in his gaze the way an eagle might hold a rabbit in its talons. “This class a game?”

“No, sir,” he said. He wasn't sure what Mr. Sherman considered the class, but Stan wasn't stupid. He knew how to answer.

“See, Kramden? It's not a game to Hawkins. To Hawkins, it's a competition, a way to learn about life in the real world.”

Kramden looked like he wanted to answer, but he was quaking too much.

“You go ahead and pick first then, Hawkins,” Mr. Sherman said. “We're
competing
in basketball today, although I guess Kramden here is
playing
basketball.”

“Yes, sir,” Stan answered. During all this, Stan had been looking straight ahead, scanning the rest of the boys in the class as they stood in a line. Most of them, wisely, had their gazes dropped to the floor. No sense attracting the attention of Mr. Sherman when he already had
the scent of blood in his nostrils.

Everyone, that is, except Kurt Marlowe. Kurt Marlowe, who was looking at Stan expectantly. Kurt Marlowe, who wet his pants in Mrs. Carter's third-grade class and never outlived it. Kurt Marlowe, who had some kind of nasal problem that made him sniff constantly. Kurt Marlowe, who was invisible most of the time, and probably wished he was invisible when he wasn't. Kurt Marlowe, who was always picked last in gym class.

Kurt Marlowe looked at him expectantly, eyes moist and bright, and Stan felt . . . what was it he felt? Pity? Maybe. But as he thought about the event that would follow, he knew it wasn't pity that fueled his decision. It was something else. Staking out new territory, maybe. Doing the exact opposite of what Mr. Sherman expected because . . . precisely because that's what it was.